Comparison of Grain-Growth Mean-Field Models Regarding Predicted Grain Size Distributions

Mean-field models have the ability to predict the evolution of grain size distribution that occurs through thermomechanical solicitations. This article focuses on a comparison of mean-field models under grain-growth conditions. Different microstructure representations are considered and discussed, especially regarding the consideration of topology in the neighborhood construction. Experimental data obtained with a heat treatment campaign on 316L austenitic stainless steel are used for the identification of material parameters and as a reference for model comparisons. Mean-field models are also applied to both mono- and bimodal initial grain size distributions to investigate the potential benefits of introducing neighborhood topology in microstructure prediction models. This article demonstrates that improvements in the predictions can be obtained in monomodal cases for topological models. In the bimodal test, no comparison with experimental data was performed as no data were available. But relative comparisons between models indicated few differences in the predictions. Although of interest, the consideration of neighborhood topology in grain-growth mean-field models generally results in only small improvements compared to classical mean-field models, especially in terms of implementation complexity.